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-I’m Shayna Egan.
I am a jewelry maker and designer,
and I work as a bench jeweler at Green Lake Jewelry Works.
We primarily here work with precious metals,
so platinum, karated golds, and silver.
I don’t think it’s greatly different than other media.
The fundamentals are the same.
So composition, form, function --
all of that remains the same.
I was always encouraged to experiment and draw,
so from the time I was very little
and could hold a pencil and playing with Play-Doh,
of course, things like that.
Working with my hands is something
that always was sort of innate and natural for me to do.
Gosh. I’ve done a little bit of everything.
Guitar tech is probably the most influential job I had,
just because it was very early in my career
and kind of set me up for what I do now.
I did that for almost 10 years.
During that time period,
I spent a lot of my free time playing in bands,
because it was the mid-'90s,
and that’s right when women were starting to become super visible
in the arts in that way.
And I picked up the guitar and taught myself
and then was lucky enough to get offered the job
at the guitar shop.
So it lent itself naturally to playing with a lot of bands.
In 2016, I moved to Seattle
and then went straight into benchwork.
Design was always of particular interest to me,
just in general, like, being in the world,
working with objects or tools,
and coming across things that aren’t designed well
and being frustrated with the way they function
or didn’t function.
And that being such a large part
of what metalsmithing is,
it sort of overlaps between design,
conceptual art, and craft.
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It is something that’s existed for hundreds of years
and is done essentially the same way
for the entire time it’s existed.
You heat metal up, and you bend it and move it
and push it back into shape and shove stones into it.
It’s endlessly complex,
and there’s always more to learn.
In terms of teaching,
I enjoy it because I am such a nerd
and I am so passionate about it.
I love watching someone get excited for themselves
when they finally get ahold
of a skill that they’ve been struggling with
and they’re like, "Now I finally get it."
And it happens, and then they can just move forward with it.
You think it’s gonna go faster now that you’ve gotten
a couple in there? -I’m hoping so,
now that I’ve kind of figured out how to get them in there
and what to look for, and yeah.
-We work at a nearly microscopic level.
I mean, we work down to,
especially when we’re setting stones --
You know, some of the stones we set
are .7 millimeters in diameter.
That’s about the smallest that we go
for something like a hidden halo next to a center stone.
My particular favorite is restoration work,
so I’ll take something that is sometimes
more than 100 years old and refurbish it in a way
that makes it possible to wear again
for a whole nother generation.
And I think that’s an incredibly special,
special thing to do for someone.
I think it’s interesting, because it’s something
that is such an intimate experience for the person
that is asking for the object.
It’s something you wear in your body sometimes every day.
And so that way, I think it’s different than other arts.
I think that’s one of the things that was
most brought to my attention being in school --
watching people grapple with
how to combine craft versus fine art,
where fine art is typically, like,
in the vein of conceptual art.
So lots of big ideas
and then trying to make that come through in the object.
Whereas craft disciplines are more oriented
towards the function of something.
Finding an interesting balance between those two things
and getting them to go together is --
it’s a puzzle, and you have to figure it out every time.
It is endless.
You can keep going deeper on every level with it.
You know, people spend their whole careers
just dealing with gemstones
or just with diamonds,
or some jewelers are just engravers.
They just embellish the surface of jewelry.
I love to fabricate.
so I love to take, you know, wire sheet
and turn it into something else.
And in that way, it is wonderful and terrible,
because you can never know all the things,
but you always get to learn more.
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-Follow Shana and see
more of her work on Instagram.
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Catch Art Zone Friday nights at 8,
or anytime online at SeattleChannel.org/ArtZone
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